The final days of 1860 demonstrated a marked difference from the joys of secession just weeks before. Chapter 5 explains the relativity of time for South Carolinians as they rapidly approached secession and then spent the next several months waiting for action. The occupation of Fort Sumter caused women in South Carolina to feel constantly on edge and anticipate war. This chapter discusses melancholy Christmases, comparisons of weather to the state of the Union, and a restless energy that caused the most pacifist of women to long for action. Some women used writing to relieve their tensions, and others could not write. Those that did utilized popular conventions of the sentimental novel to express their political misgivings and describe their subdued holidays. Anxious women increasingly predicted a millenarian end of days and prayed for God to take them to heaven rather than allow them to exist in a world with freed African Americans. This chapter takes seriously these women’s frantic, religious pleas and explores the interrelation between emotions, politics, and religion. It ends on the eve of yet another moment of catharsis: the siege of Fort Sumter in April 1861.

Chapter 4 argues that the return of South Carolinian elites from their summer travels by October 1860 marks the end of the antebellum period for the state. By October, men and women alike were unable to avoid discussions of politics, a frenzy which sparked suddenly rather than grew over the summer. Almost all women in this study realized that Lincoln’s impending election brought about a point of no return. This chapter explores how women grappled with this all-consuming political atmosphere, both with religious reservation and wide-eyed patriotism, all within the constraints of political expression considered suitable for “ladies.” It argues that women were more likely to predict the devastating effects of war that disunion would bring and engages with masculinity studies in explaining why men could not, or would not, express similar worry. To make sense of their rapidly changing world, women wove political discussion into letters and diaries alongside social visits, chores, and the weather, and self-consciously defended their right to do so. The chapter closes with the cathartic events surrounding South Carolina’s secession on December 20, 1860.

This chapter recounts women’s reactions to the siege and subsequent fall of Fort Sumter and their short-lived hope that it would be the sole conflict that resulted from secession. Their cathartic moment of joy quickly evaporated when soldiers departed for Virginia, leaving them once again in a tormented state of lonely anticipation. Until the events of First Bull Run, men’s letters home expressed a jovial mood. This atmosphere changed drastically when loved ones began to die in combat. Thus, while Fort Sumter may be considered the first shot of the Civil War, it took First Bull Run for South Carolinians to realize the urgency of the conflict and finally, completely, enter the Civil War. The conclusion traces the lives of the elite white women profiled through the Civil War and its aftermath. Many of them earnestly subscribed to the Lost Cause myth after the war, writing rosy memoirs of antebellum days or joining Confederate memorial organizations. That their prewar predictions of doom and destruction do not line up with their postwar remembrances further proves that the Lost Cause mythology is divorced from the reality of the South after the Civil War.